Elements such as credit cards form an important part of life in this country. Such cards are customarily provided with a portion specially adapted to receive the authorized signature of the card holder. This is so that a cardholder can establish his identity simply by affixing his signature to a separate piece of paper: comparison of that signature with the one on the card gives reasonably secure identification.
When a credit card is stolen its only value is in the purchasing power it represents, and lawless persons can gain an advantage by removing the authorized signature and substituting their own signatures of the cardholders names. To avoid this the signature portion of such cards are provided with a warning underlay, and the signature surface is such that it tends to ablate as a result of attempted erasure, revealing the warning beneath.
Practical experience has shown that the wear and tear of ordinary use tends to blur and degrade the original signature so that it becomes smudged, dim, or otherwise nearly useless for its intended purpose. Any attempt by the cardholder to re-sign the card gives a very suspicious appearance to the card. The same wear and tear occasionally results in the at least incipient appearnace of the warning underlay, to the point where the cardholder may be embarassed by a salesperson legitimately questioning the validity of the card. For these reasons card issuing agencies now engaged in a continuous process of replacing worn or illegible cards, entirely apart from the replacement of lost or damaged ones.
One alternative, that of encapsulating the entire card in plastic, cannot be done in a mass production method by the supplier of the cards, but must be accomplished after affixing of the signature, requiring the cardholder to go to an establishment performing such surfaces, and involving an expense to him.